The idea that a painter's work translates her experience of the world haunts the art, making a purely abstract reading of Thibeault's pictures all but impossible no matter what she intends.

Awareness of upheavals around the globe - the catastrophe in Japan, the uprising and aerial bombings in Libya - also colors our reception of Thibeault's work, even though she made what we see here before many of them occurred. Humanity never runs short of crises.

But the drama of Thibeault's paintings consists not in their evocation of calamities but in how they show her wresting her attention free of dire events' dispiriting power.

A picture such as "Crossing" (2011) presents compositional architecture dissolved in a churn of gestures and hues that defies analysis, probably even by her. It inscribes the claims of the painting process on Thibeault's attention, as if they alone promised deliverance from obsession with demoralizing events.

The muted palette of "Crossing" sets it apart. The other paintings here affirm more openly that Thibeault also seeks a sort of consolation in painting's freedom to release color from reference.

So she does dismantle depiction to prove, as perhaps only painting can, that its spell - which stretches from our inner lives to our handheld devices - can still be broken.

Lawson also presents a group of photographs by Susan Mikula, whose extremely soft-focus approach at first brings to mind the work of Uta Barth. But Mikula arrives at her muted images, seemingly void of scale, by digital scanning of Polaroid originals, to generate rag paper prints mounted on crisp aluminum sheets.

By their peculiar combination of sharp materiality and ungraspable visual information, Mikula's pictures seem to set themselves adrift in time, neither nostalgic nor futuristic nor recognizably of the present.

"Heads" minus tales: Art historian and museum director emeritus Peter Selz, now in his 90s, has a longer view than most of what has persisted and what has expired in the art of several generations past. So his choice of "Heads" as the theme of the show he assembled for Dolby Chadwick warrants serious reflection.

Significantly, Selz sidelines the notion of portraiture, although several things on view announce themselves as portraits or self-portraits. "Heads" encompasses both living and dead, portrait and mask, individual and symbol.

Jim Morphesis' big-fisted painting of a skull emerges as the show's emblematic work. As a memento mori, it flirts with cliche, but with its title, "For Miguel de Unamuno II" (1985), Morphesis invokes the Basque writer whose "tragic sense of life" entails a striving for rational truth burdened by awareness of existence as a finally baffling and merciless situation.

Something of that existentialist bleakness pervades the show, as if Selz feels that contemporary art or its audience needs shaking awake from some funk of denial.

Why do we not always see full-face portraiture as beheading, as Nathan Oliveira's late bronze "Masks" mischievously encourage? Does the face or some other aspect of the head enable it to betoken a whole individual as, say, a foot or a knee cannot?

Or does the quality of scrutiny, the creative scruple an artwork registers matter most, as two Lucian Freud prints here suggest?

"Heads" does not answer such questions. Perhaps no exhibition could. But by dramatic contrasts in style - among Gottfried Helnwein, Sherie Franssen, Alex Kanevsky and others - it reopens them in lively fashion.